My gaming group is about to enter Cauldron and begin this AP. One of the thorny issues I wanted to address was understanding Ghelve's actions and motivations. Was a kidnapped familiar a good enough reason to endanger your community and possibly destroy your business? Not sure.
Here's what I've come up with in case you'd like to comment.
You'll notice from the HC that the first 2 people who go missing are gnomes. That's important. About 3 months before the party arrives, Tiervan Wispwort, Aeryk Gylbar (local barrister) and Keygan Ghelve are sitting in the locksmith's front room as they normally do exchanging gossip. For weeks, Ghelve has had the feeling of being watched, but hasn't put his finger on where this intuition comes from.
On this particular night, a group of skulks appear from behind his curtain. 'How did you get in here?' 'From below.' 'Below? You mean, from Jzadirune?'
The gnomes would be amazed. The three of them had visited Jzadirune as wee gnomes before the Vanishing. Their memories of that time are fond, but distant. Would it be possible to return? 'There are still artifacts from your people.' 'Really?' 'If you help us, we would be willing to take you back down there.'
Tiervan's alchemy business isn't exactly thriving and he leaps at the opportunity to return to Jzadirune and see if he can recover some of the potions that once made it famous. Aeryk's law practice is more successful. He doesn't feel the need to return immediately, but later sends his law clerk, Jorl Seerkin, to find historical records that may be useful.
Keygan is tempted to explore Jzadirune, but remembers his father's warnings about the plague. It was terrible....
The tall ones want a set of skeleton keys. Why? (Unclear) The tall ones refuse to help the gnomes unless they can have a set of keys. Tiervan urges Keygan to do it. Keygan agrees as long as the houses of gnomes are not tampered with. Fine.
Tiervan and Jorl disappear for a couple of months. No word. Aeryk attempts to calm Keygan's worries over their fate by saying (something). 'Besides, Jzadirune is a place for gnomes. If the authorities are brought in, they may take it away from us and try us for treason! Let's wait until our friends return, then we can inform the town guard.'
About 2 weeks before the adventurers arrive, Keygan confronts the skulks over the whereabouts of his friends. They refuse to answer his questions. When he makes idle threats about going to the guards, they respond with a kidnapping a few days later. Jasper Drundlesput is Keygan's youngest sister's youngest son. The message is clear: keep quiet.
When the adventurers arrive, this sets up an opportunity for Keygan to be out from under the skulks and enlist their aid in finding his friends (who may or may not still be in Jzadirune).
So, how's this?
Sounds good.
In my campaign they never asked too much questions about the reason why Keyghan worked with the Skulk, they were fully on the disappearance all around the city and when they catched him he told the story about the familiar, not a very great threat as you say.
If I remember, I added a family member kidnapped to the story.
My take on it: At first, he just made a few spare keys out of fear for his familiar. But after it was clear they weren't simple burglars, he kept quiet about the kidnappings out of fear for his own life (both from the skulk gang and from the authorities if they found out he helped the gang).
I left it as-is and had the party debate Ghelve's level of guilt...and no-one really cared. Not apathy, just a morally ambiguous group of characters.
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My party bought the familiar/personal danger as enough reason for Ghelve to allow the skulks and dark creepers out into Cauldron. What really interested them was why he had kept copies of the keys to all of his locks in the first place.
To answer that, I decided that Revus Twindaggers, the Last Laugh member that had been in contact with Patch (the custodian at the Lantern Street Orphanage) had come to Ghelve pretending to be an agent of the Lord Mayor, and had demanded that he maintain copies for city security. When this came out at Ghelve's trial, the Lord Mayor immediately ceased the proceedings and Ghelve was summarily found guilty and sentenced to death. He begged the PCs to exonerate him, but before they could track down Twindaggers, the execution was carried out. When they subsequently found Twindaggers, he essentially admitted that he had been hired to pose as an agent of the Mayor, but refused to give up his employer.
In my campaign Ghelve was an unwilling accomplice. They had his familiar hostage and threatened him with both his familiar's and his own death if he said anything to anyone. The fact that a Skulk was always watching him also served as a deterrent to telling anyone. Of course, once people started to be kidnapped then their lives were at stake as well.
The PC's in my campaign felt that it wasn't Ghelve's fault that he did what he did. He was just put in a difficult situation where there wasn't a lot he could do. The testified strongly in his favour at Ghelve's trial, which helped to have his sentence reduced. Instead of death or a long time behind bars, Ghelve got off relatively lightly.
He had to replace every single lock he had made in town (which is a lot and will take him over a year to do). He is basically on house arrest when he's not out changing the locks over. On top of that, he forfieted ownership of his house and business to the city.
We are in to Zenith Trajectory now and the players still check in on him every now and again to see how he's going. Strangely enough, they also started a friendship up with Xuthal, the mimic who was guarding Starbrow, Ghelve's familiar. The managed to get Xuthal a job with the town guard. He mimics the door frame to the entrance to Jzadirune, stopping anyone from entering that isn't allowed. :-)
Olaf the Stout
In my campaign Ghelve was an unwilling accomplice. They had his familiar hostage and threatened him with both his familiar's and his own death if he said anything to anyone. The fact that a Skulk was always watching him also served as a deterrent to telling anyone. Of course, once people started to be kidnapped then their lives were at stake as well.
The PC's in my campaign felt that it wasn't Ghelve's fault that he did what he did. He was just put in a difficult situation where there wasn't a lot he could do. The testified strongly in his favour at Ghelve's trial, which helped to have his sentence reduced. Instead of death or a long time behind bars, Ghelve got off relatively lightly.
He had to replace every single lock he had made in town (which is a lot and will take him over a year to do). He is basically on house arrest when he's not out changing the locks over. On top of that, he forfieted ownership of his house and business to the city.
This is almost identical to what happened with my players. The only difference is that one PC (a dwarven rogue) was the son of a locksmith; his family's shop became much, much more popular all of a sudden! Ghelve ended up moving to Sasserine and starting over (after paying a huge fine).
In our campaign, Ghelve was arrested and one of the PCs defended him in court. It was a good opportunity to bring out some of the other nobles in town - Lord Vhalantru, the town magistrate, and Ike Iverson, who prosecuted the case, and some of the other nobles.
Of course, the facts of the case were against him ("you traded people for a rat?"). If he had come forward when he realized what was going on, that might have been a mitigating factor, but he didn't. However, some good rolls by the PCs led to a victory of sorts for Ghelve. He had to pay fines, but was also barred from locksmithing.
Strangely enough, once he helped my party they never made public his involvement. They gave him back his familiar and let him go on about his business. The party has just returned from Bhal-Hamatugn and to this day they are the only ones that know he was involved int he kidnappings.
The part is not immoral they are just lead by an immoral character and if she can distract the paladin long enough can get away with some amazing things.
One member of the group I ran through this also had a familiar, so she persuaded the group that Ghelve wasn't a bad guy. They also didn't make his actions public.
In fact, after the group made contact with The Chisel, they made an introduction for Ghelve. Now the little gnome is working on the High Handcrafter (or whatever its called) prestige class. He'll be making gnarly locks for the group in no time!